Suggestion board suggestions?

Posted 5 years, 10 months ago (Edited 5 years, 10 months ago) by hedgemaze

So I hesitate to post this because I know the staff are volunteers and doing their best, but this sub-forum is... chaotic. Suggestions regularly get re-posted, only some suggestions or bugs get staff responses, and I think a lot of things can fall through the cracks and get lost just from the nature of how many posts this sub-forum gets.

I was (also volunteer) staff on a game for a few years that was in alpha testing, so we had bugs all the time, and on the bugs sub-forum staff could flair posts as:

PLEASE READ - for PSAs
Priority - for bugs that need to be fixed asap
New - for bug posts staff haven't responded to yet (the default state)
Need More Info - for problems we needed more info before we could figure out how to fix it
Acknowledged - for small problems staff were aware of but not significant enough to be a priority
Resolved - for fixed bugs (or things that turned out to be user error)
Duplicate - for posts about problems that already had another post about them

That site also ran on bootstrap and the flairs were differently-colored pills (screenshot example from the ideas board); posts were auto-sorted in the order I listed them above.

The same system was used on the help board (although posts weren't auto-sorted):

PLEASE READ - for PSAs
Answered - once the person's question had been answered or their problem solved
New - new questions not responded to yet (the default state)

And the idea board (same):

PLEASE READ - for PSAs
New - ideas newly posted that haven't been responded to (the default state)
Need More Info - ideas that need more work
Approved - approved ideas that will be added in the future, so people can stop asking for it
Rejected - rejected ideas so the post can die
On Game - for ideas either already implemented, or implemented after the post was made

We could also lock threads for, say, rejected ideas. I am aware that any such system would be more work for the staff here, but it was so helpful to me and the other staff on that game to tame the chaos and know what bugs and ideas to work on first, and for our users to know what the status of anything was (and to stop posting duplicates) that I humbly submit this information in case any of it would be useful for Toyhouse's staff (and if TH doesn't feel like it has enough staff, I am sure there are people who would be happy to help).

_featherweather

I definitely would love a way for the mod teams to like... flag threads as "issue being working on" or "rejected" or something, because it's hard to know what the status is (esp when i see threads pop up for things that i sent a report in for and the report hasn't been responded to)

i know part of the problem with dupe threads is that thread searching isn't widely implemented (i would not be surprised if either thread or tag search are one of the most posted threads in the suggestions boards and it's 100% because people don't go far back enough to find the answer, one of the reasons why i made the FAQ thread to hopefully limit the # of dupe threads)

piggybacking on this idea, i know some sites have this... idk what to call it, auto suggest feature? based on the title of your thread - if your thread has certain buzzwords, before you can submit it, it will show you possible answers/similar threads that might answer your question. that would definitely be harder to implement just the pill info though haha.

Caine

I don't use the suggestions thread and don't know much about coding, but like as an idea I really like it & feel like it would probably help a ton by keeping things in a better check

fuelli

This a super great idea! I would love to see that being implemented :o

minsu

Whew I meant to reply to this a lot earlier but Things Happened™. Just wanted to let you know that I have in fact seen this thread, thank you for the suggestions!